


transcendental youth

by westmoor



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotionally Constipated Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia Has Feelings, Hurt Jaskier | Dandelion, M/M, Nobody is Dead, Nonsense, One Shot, Pining, Pre-Slash, This almost turned into a Hotel California AU without my consent or knowledge, liminal spaces
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-20 18:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30008997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/westmoor/pseuds/westmoor
Summary: An inn at a crossroads, a bard in continuous employment, a contract for a werewolf gone horribly wrong, and not everything is as it seems.Geralt had known something was wrong with the place the very first time he set foot in it. Something in the air that just wasn't right, tense and heavy like a creeping thunderstorm.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 21
Kudos: 81





	transcendental youth

Geralt had known something was wrong with the place the very first time he set foot in it. Something in the air, tense and heavy like a creeping thunderstorm. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and he had to fight the urge to tense his shoulders, to tamper down the part of him that expected an attack.

There was no telling what caused it. No obvious signs, no runes on the posts outside. No vagrants more peculiar than the regular heap one’d find in any crossroads inn, the kind where a thousand strangers drifted through for a night, for a day, like breeze; Just long enough to leave a hint of their scent behind, amalgamating in a smell that felt oddly uniform to all such places. 

The man behind the bar whistled a jaunty tune as Geralt approached, stopping only when the clinking of coins echoed his request for lodging.

A head tilt and a once-over that was far too obvious to even have been attempted to be covert, and a drink was being poured before he could even request one. 

“What brings a Witcher to our neck of the woods, then?” The barkeep pushed the ale ahead and leaned closer, tone upbeat.

It wasn’t common, even in these parts, to be met without at least some aversion, and it caught Geralt off guard.

Not unheard of either, though. There were certain kinds of people. Geralt would run into them from time to time, in barnyards and backwater towns, condemned to a life of mucking stalls or wiping tables. Young and overconfident and convinced the world would be better to them if only they were somewhere else.

His age was impossible to pinpoint - coltishness more in demeanor than in body - but otherwise he fit the bill just fine. Bright eyes and a boyish smile, dishrag tossed over the shoulder of a shirt unlaced at the throat in that distinct way a mother would disapprove of.

Still, it rarely hurt to be polite.

“I saw notices about werewolf attacks posted along the road. Thought there might be work to be found here.” 

To be fair, they could be just about anything. Bandit attacks were common in the region, robberies could go wrong anywhere. But the young barkeep nodded, and pushed the cup of ale closer, indulging.

“You’ll want to see the sheriff about that. If you go straight up the road from here, it’ll be on your left. Ugly, squat little thing, you can’t possibly miss it,” he said, and winked. “And the building isn’t much to look at, either.”

Geralt snorted into his cup and was about to make a retort, when a shout from what he assumed to be the kitchen broke through the conversation, sounding urgent.

The stranger rolled his eyes and flicked a lock of mussed brown hair from his face with a toss of his neck.

“Duty calls, I suppose.” He placed a hefty room key next to the ale with a clang, but only waved when Geralt reached over to pay for the drink. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you around, Witcher!”

And with that, he was gone.

\--

The directions proved true and by noon, Geralt had negotiated a contract to hunt a werewolf. A run for supplies, a trip to a herbalist, and a look around the route he expected to take, however, took the rest of the afternoon. By the time he made it back to the inn, night was already falling.

He paused at the sound of music and laughter pouring out into the evening, and regretted not returning sooner. Making his way through the thick of a crowd just to get a meal didn’t have a particularly tempting ring to it, and neither did going to bed hungry, though he had endured worse.

But once inside he recognized one of the voices in the debacle, and sure enough: At the other side of the dining hall, perched upon a table with a lute slung across his front, was the youth that had manned the bar that morning.

Years later, he’d invent excuses for why he didn’t take the meal in his room or retreat altogether. At the time, no such thing crossed his mind. He sunk onto a bench in the far corner of the room with a bowl of warm stew in hand, and listened.

He could sing, Geralt would give him that. Could draw and hold a crowd, too, it seemed. At least half of the people in the room appeared to be local, or at least to already know most of his songs, judging by the way they joined the choruses.

And, well, performance suited him. Flickering firelight turned his hair to polished copper, plucking and strumming of strings seemed effortless even as he danced along with his audience. The lyrics were mostly innuendo and drivel, admittedly, but the tunes carried well, easy and clever.

Despite the jovial chaos it turned nearly meditative after a while, noises blending together to an undulating mass of sound. Geralt slipped into the ease of it, sitting in a corner at the edge of the crowd long after finishing his supper. Not a single eye drifted his way, all enraptured by the entertainment in their midst. 

So it dragged on into the small hours of the night, until the lights burned low and the crowd dispersed. He was just about to gather himself and retreat to his room - it was a decent one for the price, for once - when someone slumped down into the chair opposite of his. Heavy and brash, smelling of lavender oil and exertion and joy.

“Care to comment on the quality of my performance?” He sounded a little out of breath, but looked no worse for wear. Rather, he looked invigorated. Hair tousled and mussed, cheeks flushed vibrant, pulled-open collar exposing a sheen of sweat glistening at his throat. He wore a doublet this time, though that was also opened - deep rich blue, with yellow thread trailing the path of his clavicles like dandelions.

“You stayed throughout, so surely you must have some review for me?”

He could’ve played in a court somewhere, Geralt mused. In gold and silk, not by candlelight in a dingy tavern, lost between the edges of the world. 

Those, however, were not words for meant strangers.

“The creatures in your song aren’t real. And dragons don’t behave like that.”

The youth had at least the decency to look surprised, before he pursed his lips and looked at his tablemate, appraising.

“Is it a common Witcher feature, the white hair?” 

Geralt narrowed his eyes at the question, sensing a lead-up but unsure of what to. In different company he might’ve ignored the question entirely, but the lad had been nice to him so far. There was no need to spoil that. 

“No. Not really.”

The grin his response sparked was sharp enough to cut through glass

“So I was right about you.” He raised an accusing finger, though the grin didn’t fade. “The scary swords, the wolf pendant, the scowly attitude - you’re _Geralt of Rivia_.”

He leaned back and clapped his hands in delight. “Oh, this is wonderful! Nettie owes me a night off, say-” and here he stooped forward to lean his elbow on the table. An air of determination filled the space between them, and although Geralt didn’t know him, he felt certain that nothing good could come of it. 

“- Say, you’re here to hunt a werewolf, are you not?”

He nodded, hesitant.

“Why don’t I come with you? And I’ll have something _real_ to sing about.”

Geralt snorted into the dregs of his ale, before belatedly realising the boy was serious.

\---

_No_ was apparently not a word in his newfound (and unwelcome) bard’s native vocabulary. Neither, as it turned out, was _absolutely not_ , or _it’s dangerous_ or _fuck off._

And so it wasn’t surprising, or at least it shouldn’t have been, when Geralt found himself with company the next evening.

The moon was not yet full, but close enough to chance a werewolf hunt, and he had a good feeling for the night. Or at least he would have, if he hadn’t left town heeled by an unusually large and conversational spaniel with a notebook in its hand and a lute strapped to its shoulder. 

“It’s Jaskier, by the way,” the not-really-a-spaniel barked from a few feet behind, trotting to keep up. “My name. I realise you never asked and figured it could be because I never really gave you a chance to.”

Geralt bit back his retort, determined not to progress the conversation. In truth, he had hoped not to find out. The way that voice stuck to his mind or calloused fingertips brushed against his forearm when he addressed him across the bartop that morning didn’t need a name, and he couldn’t miss what he hadn’t known.

“Or it was my name. Once I get out of this pigsty of a town whose population has little to brag about greater than their propensity for marrying cousins - back on the great winding road with the world at my feet, free to go anywhere, it’ll be my name again and every knight and every peasant on the Continent will know it.”

“Then why haven’t you left already?” It slipped out unbidden and he regretted it instantly, even more so when the snappy response he expected didn’t come. 

No sound at all came for a long while. When Geralt stole a glance over his shoulder, the man - Jaskier - was walking with his shoulders hunched, a tightness to his jaw that wasn’t there before. 

He didn’t usually mind silence, but this felt wrong somehow, like a divergence from the natural order. It thickened in his lungs like smoke. So much so that when the forest around them encroached, edge creeping closer and denser around their passage, he held back a sigh of relief.

With strict orders to stay behind and to not stray from the road for anything, and another argument in which he questioned Jaskier’s most basic instincts for survival, Geralt stepped out of the grooves from the carriage wheels and into the woods.

It was hardly ideal to have a human - and a stubbornly vulnerable one at that - so close, but it could turn out in their favour. Following single-tracked pawprints left previous nights, Geralt knew where the wolf would be coming from. And now, as long as the bard didn’t wander off, he knew where it would be heading.

For once, he thought, luck might be on his side.

It was the scream that alerted him.

It sounded close but the direction was wrong, too far north, and it pulled him from any semblance of a trail and through thicket and brushes, guided more by sound than by sight.

Moments later, when he broke through the undergrowth and into an open space, the scene that met him would burrow into the dark corners of his mind, waiting to creep out and take hold behind his eyelids for years to come. 

The werewolf stood tall, poised on its rear legs in the clearing. Shaggy, grey and ragged, though it had been feeding well on weary travellers for months, it appeared starved and diseased.

Below it, crumpled like a piece of parchment, lay a man.

The fight was short.

The beast was caught unawares, too drunk on the scent and taste of blood to hear him coming. 

He might’ve looked calm, Geralt thought, eerily so, if not for the glaze of confusion coating his eyes. Or his skin, washed pale either by the light of the near-full moon streaming down from gaps in the canopy above, or by the red blooming through the rags of his doublet, turning threads of dandelions into poppies. 

They made it back, somehow, to the inn at the crossroads. Geralt was already calling for help by the time he nearly kicked the door down. Someone whose name he knew but couldn’t recall helped him lower his charge to the floor.

There really was something to the smell of those places - one that couldn’t be cleaned away but always grew. Fragments of moments and people that added up until they blended together, indistinguishable and forgotten but lingering nonetheless. 

Now, it was blood soaking into the floorboards. And something else, acrid and bitter, and Geralt knew what was coming.

A ragged breath and a final tremor, and it was all that was left of Jaskier the bard.

\--

He left town before dawn.

The burial would be at noon, he heard, and he figured he best be well on his way by then.

Only an empty purse and the threat of being hailed as a coward drove him through the sheriff’s quarters, before directing Roach towards the forest road. 

He couldn’t expect payment after such a farce. Not without proof of completion and with the stench of innocent blood on his hands, no matter how thoroughly he’d scrubbed them. But to his surprise, the sheriff paid him in full, and made no mention of the fatal aftermath of his hunt - as though the death of their tavern’s singer was water under the bridge, already forgotten.

Geralt wished he could forget so easily. 

Even after the money was spent (new reins and repairs to his scabbard, a night or two on a mouldy mattress and the rest poured in a street musician’s hat) memories still trailed in his wake like a ghost.

They came like sparks and flickers, little jabs when he least expected it. He would find himself humming _his_ tunes as he brushed down his horse. In crowded inns or busy market squares he’d catch glimpses of brown-haired young men and need to look twice. Some nights, he dreamt of bright-lit eyes and ringing laughter. Others, of bloodstained doublets and collarbones strewn with yellow flowers. 

From then on, he stayed clear of Kerack. 

\--

Whatever decisions he made in life, whatever resolve he committed himself to, life held firm in seeing them broken.

It took years, enough to lose count past a handful, but eventually he found himself riding between the deep grooves of carriage tracks through dense forest, towards an inn at a crossroads.

Some would’ve blamed destiny. He called it misfortune.

Unsure whether he’d be allowed to stay for even a meal, if he would be recognized, or if anyone remembered him at all, he left his mare tacked and bridled at the posts outside.

It hadn’t changed, neither the dining hall downstairs nor the scent or sound of foreign travellers. He felt sure that if he looked down, there would still be darkened stains on the floor where he had last knelt with death in his arms.

Nothing had changed at all.

He stood frozen, rooted and speechless. A trick, surely. A haze or a fever dream, perhaps from drugs or poison - 

The inn was large and stately and barely a quarter full, but that wasn’t the issue. 

Across the room, behind the bartop, a young man looked up from the tankard he just poured. Sweeping the hair from his brow, his gaze (blue, he remembered, his eyes were blue) fell on the Witcher in the doorway. And he smiled, wide and genuine, and raised his arms in greeting.

His doublet was green and indecently unfastened, revealing the trim of his shirt and a smooth, unblemished throat.

“Geralt!” Jaskier called out, barely audible though the sound of his own heart pounding. “I hope you’ve come to stay for the night, I have a song about a werewolf that I think you just might enjoy!”

**Author's Note:**

> tumblr @westmoor should you feel the need to shake me by the lapels


End file.
